Enhancing the Therapist–Device Relationship: Software Requirements for Digital Collection and Analysis of Patient Data

Improving upon the therapist–device relationship is an important aspect that will increase the number of upper-limb robotic rehabilitation devices being used for therapy. One path to strengthen this relationship is for these devices to generate large data sets that rehabilitation therapists can use to enhance their patient assessment procedures. In this article, a national survey of Canadian therapists was conducted in order to learn about their data collection and analysis methods. A total of 33 responses were gathered from an online survey. These results show that there is a demand for the collection and visualization of various patient data, some of which cannot be easily collected with existing methods. It was also seen that there exists a large variation between therapists about which major steps constitute the general rehabilitation process. From these results, a set of fourteen general software requirements has been created. Insights from the survey regarding influences on software designs are briefly discussed. This research helps to enable the development of software systems that increase the interaction potential between therapists and robotic devices.